The Ultimate Ecommerce SEO Checklist for Brands in 2019

It’s safe to say that if your brand’s product and category pages aren’t on the first page for your main keywords, then you miss out on a ton of traffic and customers.

If that’s the case, then it’s time to give your website an SEO audit and implement on-page and technical ecommerce SEO best practices to better rank for target keywords, improve click-through rate, rank higher on the SERP, and ultimately bring in more customers.

“While Amazon’s search engine is important for shopper conversions, Google is still the number one organic search engine. The biggest advantage brands get when they optimize their website to rank organically is the ability to engage shoppers at every point in their journey to purchase.”

The Ultimate SEO Checklist for Ecommerce Brands In 2019

Before we get started, it’s important to recognize that there is no single approach to winning at SEO for ecommerce.

Optimizing your web presence for search engines is a constantly evolving practice — so don’t expect your website to jump to the number one spot of Google’s results overnight.

“Brands with strong content programs can potentially attract new shoppers with a value-driven blog post or other content, capture their email, and nurture them all the way through to purchase via drip campaigns,” says Kelly.

“SEO isn’t the most glamorous investment, but once brands have optimized their product pages and have potentially built up a strong content program, they’ll see returns far beyond their initial spend.”

8 On-Page Best Practices for Building Organic Ecommerce SEO

On-page SEO is everything that you can control on front-end of your content: the structure of your website, content on your product and category pages, the keywords used, the URLs, headers, and more.

1. Create Descriptive, Clean URLs for Users as well as Search Engines

Ecommerce websites with strong SEO have unique and easy-to-understand URLs.

“You want to create clean URLs so the search engines can easily understand them and users can quickly identify page themes.”

2. Product & Category Pages Should Have Unique Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Not only should your URLs be short and keyword-driven, but your page titles and meta descriptions should also include your brand’s keywords and also be unique for every page.

Both the title and meta descriptions are important parts of your website that will surface on Google’s SERP — and the first things that will stand out among you and your competitors.

Chameleon Cold-Brew has a simple yet effective title and meta description that includes important keywords: organic, ethically sourced, consciously crafted, smooth, etc.

An engaging title and meta description will increase your click-through rate (CTR), which Google will then interpret as your website matching search intent, which then contributes to raising your rank on the SERP.

3. Incorporate Keywords Into Web Copy And Headers

Yes, we’re talking about keywords again, and this time in the actual copy and headers of your webpages.

Much like #1 on this list, it’s important to incorporate your brand’s keywords within the actual content of your webpages, including H1s, H2s, and H3s (these are the different sized headers).

Cheribundi, for example, has a separate part of their ecommerce website for nutrition, health benefits, and athletic training that speaks to the benefits of their beverages for health.

Each of Cheribundi’s education pages incorporates keyword-driven headers followed by short paragraphs that also incorporate health and product-oriented keywords. Source:Cheribundi

Each page of your website as an opportunity to introduce your keywords in a meaningful way that will contribute to the overall SEO authority of your website.

…yet are still high-quality (blurry or low-res camera images will turn customers away)

Computer-enhanced images have become the standard — they can reduce glare, shadows, and make for much richer colors in product photos.

6. Link Building: Internal, External, and Backlinks

Much like keywords and how they lend to your websites relevancy for certain queries, linking can also lend to your website’s authority and tells Google which pages are related to others.

There are three different types of links that can contribute to your SEO optimization:

Internal links: links between pages of your website

External links: links to other websites

Backlinks: links from other websites to your own

Internal links should be built out to link to relevant products, offers, and downloads — with compelling call-to-actions (CTAs).

“Internal linking shows Google that your pages are related and makes it easier for users to move within your site, which increases their time on the site and increases your site’s value in Google’s eyes,” explains Kelly.

Moon Juice’s ecommerce website includes a “Recipes” section that provides useful content to users, internal links to various products, while building SEO and upsell opportunities.

External links should be used to link out to external websites that have a high domain authority.

Backlinks, or links from other websites to your own, are considered the golden goose for improving your domain authority, which can positively impact your overall SEO and the ranking of your product and category pages.

“Your domain authority is essentially your number on a “trust” scale from 1-100,” explains Kelly.

“While we don’t know exactly how Google determines this metric, we do know that Google cares very much about sending their users to trusted and relevant websites.”

“When a site with a perceived high DA links to your site, it can positively impact your page rank on Google, which impacts your site traffic, and subsequently, your conversions.”

“Domain rank” or “domain authority” are proprietary metrics provided by keyword research platforms.

However, you have to be careful to not send traffic (or customers) to your competitors or domains with low authority.

It’s always better to link to a respectable publication or website as it can contribute to the link quality of your own website.

7. Add A Blog or Customer Reviews For More SEO Content Opportunities

Most ecommerce websites are bare-bones: there’s a home page, a product page, and an about page.

This presents a problem: you are missing out on a lot of SEO potential by limiting your content to a few pages of copy and a simple catalog.

Many ecommerce businesses have gone beyond the basics and added blog content that provides valuable organic keywords and ranking opportunities.

Add Customer Reviews & Testimonials

Another valuable asset that can contribute to your ecommerce SEO content is customer reviews. Not only will stellar customer reviews help sell your products with social proof, but they will also associate your products with new keywords.

Customer reviews: valuable for social proof and SEO.

Rich Snippets

Rich snippets stand out among ordinary search results because they can display extra information that results don’t, such as images or stars for reviews.

They look like this:

The addition of an image or stars to your organic result gives more information to shoppers, which will boost click-through rate, and ultimately drive your ranking higher on the SERP.

“Reviews along with structured data can help add review rich snippets, which is incredibly valuable for ecommerce SEO,” explains Heppard.

8. Amplify Your Content

The more clicks your webpages receive, the more Google and other search engines will see it as an answer to relevant search queries.

You can amplify your content’s reach (and longevity) by promoting and distributing it across the many different platforms your target uses to get information.

This can be as simple as tweeting a link to your webpage, sharing a new product on Facebook, a paid press release, or getting a mention from a reputable publication.

In today’s competitive omnichannel environment, it can only help to have your business’ presence on multiple platforms.

Paid Amplification & Distribution

Google Search: Target branded and non-branded keywords that are essential for shoppers to find your business.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn: Distribute and boost your web content through social media platforms for more reach and shares.

Email newsletters

Guest posts

“Brands can optimize their product landing pages, so their products appear for shopper-centric terms such as “women’s jackets,” and pair those with powerful Google or Bing ads to own the front page for a term and push competitors down.”

3. Optimize Your Page Speed

A website that takes longer than 3-5 seconds to load means poorer user experience and a higher chance of someone bouncing off of your page.

Head on over to Google’s PageSpeed Insights to get an accurate analysis of how long it takes to load all of the content on your webpage.

Pro-tip: If your website takes too long to load, Google’s PageSpeed Insights will provide optimization suggestions for you. Images and media that contain large file sizes are usually a prime culprit for slow ecommerce website load speeds.

4. Make Sure You’re Mobile-friendly

Not only is it important for your website to load fast on both desktop and mobile devices, but it’s also just as important that your website is optimized for mobile devices.

5. Avoid Duplicate Pages and Content

“A common issue is filters on a page causing there to be “duplicate pages” because they’re repopulating the same page withdifferent features,” says Kelly.

Some ecommerce websites can be penalized by search engines for having too much “duplicate” content on their domain due to duplicate URL paths, poor URL structure, shopping cart pages, customer review pages, and even filters.

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices

Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs

Printer-only versions of web pages

According to Inflow, you can use Google Console (which is free to set up) and check the following sections for your domain:

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics can be used for everything — from monitoring traffic and bounce rates all the way to measuring the conversion rates of different landing pages of your website.

Best of all — it’s completely free.

2. Ahrefs, SEMRush, and MOZ

I won’t say these tools are the same for fear of public hanging by SEO-enthusiasts, but each of these tools can analyze any and every keyword on the internet, and provide insight into keyword and traffic opportunities that you can then weaponize to build SEO-rich content for your website.

Each has their own strength and user experience, I suggest playing with all three to determine which best suits your taste.

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About the AuthorGreg graduated from CSU Sacramento with a degree in International Relations. After teaching English in Istanbul, he returned to California to pursue writing about tech and digital marketing. See all posts by this author here.

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